The Rain in Portugal Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Billy Collins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Original publication information for some of the poems contained within the work can be found beginning on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Collins, Billy, author.

  Title: The rain in Portugal : poems / Billy Collins.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008639 | ISBN 9780679644064 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780399588303 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General. | HUMOR / Form / Limericks & Verse.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.O47478 A6 2016 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016008639

  Ebook ISBN 9780399588303

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for ebook

  Cover art: Charles-Antoine Coypel, Head of Potiphar’s Wife, c. 1737 (Horvitz Collection, Boston/Michael Gould)

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  A Note to the Reader About This Poetry Ebook

  Part One

  1960

  Lucky Cat

  Only Child

  The Night of the Fallen Limb

  Greece

  Bashō in Ireland

  Not So Still Life

  Cosmology

  Dream Life

  Hendrik Goltzius’s “Icarus” (1588)

  The Money Note

  Helium

  Weathervane

  Species

  The Bard in Flight

  Sirens

  Predator

  Traffic

  Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John’s Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers

  The Present

  Part Two

  On Rhyme

  The Five Spot, 1964

  2128

  Bags of Time

  One Leg of the Journey

  A Restaurant in Moscow

  Tanager

  Santorini

  Bravura

  Muybridge’s Lobsters

  Portrait

  Early Morning

  Child Lost at the Beach

  In Praise of Ignorance

  Microscopic Pants

  Many Moons

  Note to J. Alfred Prufrock

  Speed Walking on August 31, 2013

  December 1st

  Part Three

  Genuflection

  Thanksgiving

  Under the Stars

  Mister Shakespeare

  The Influence of Anxiety: A Term Paper

  Goats

  The Day After Tomorrow

  A Day in May

  The Lake

  Solvitur Ambulando

  Fire

  Bachelorette Party

  Oh, Lonesome Me

  Meditation

  Poem to the First Generation of People to Exist After the Death of the English Language

  What a Woman Said to Me After a Reading in the Napa Valley

  Joy

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Billy Collins

  About the Author

  “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

  —HEMINGWAY ON RALPH DUNNING (A Moveable Feast)

  A Note to the Reader About this Poetry Ebook

  Lines of poetry are sacred to both the author and the reader. To alter the specific construction in line length is to alter the look and rhythm of the poem.

  However, as ebooks and eReading devices have become more prevalent, readers have come to expect certain functionality, including the ability to resize the type in order to make it more legible.

  We have made sure to balance both of these needs with this ebook. It does allow you to change the size of the type in order to make the poems easier to read. This may cause unintended line breaks to occur within the poems. To preserve the rhythm of the poetry when this happens, we have formatted the ebook so that any words bumped down to a new line will be indented slightly. This way you can still follow the author’s intended rhythm for the poem while reading at the type size of your choice.

  1960

  In the old joke,

  the marriage counselor

  tells the couple who never talks anymore

  to go to a jazz club because at a jazz club

  everyone talks during the bass solo.

  But of course, no one starts talking

  just because of a bass solo

  or any other solo for that matter.

  The quieter bass solo just reveals

  the people in the club

  who have been talking all along,

  the same ones you can hear

  on some well-known recordings.

  Bill Evans, for example,

  who is opening a new door into the piano

  while some guy chats up his date

  at one of the little tables in the back.

  I have listened to that album

  so many times I can anticipate the moment

  of his drunken laugh

  as if it were a strange note in the tune.

  And so, anonymous man,

  you have become part of my listening,

  your romance a romance lost in the past

  and a reminder somehow

  that each member of that trio has died since then

  and maybe so have you and, sadly, maybe she.

  Lucky Cat

  It’s a law as immutable as the ones

  governing bodies in motion and bodies at rest

  that a cat picked up will never stay

  in the place where you choose to set it down.

  I bet you’d be happy on the sofa

  or this hassock or this knitted throw pillow

  are a few examples of bets you are bound to lose.

  The secret of winning, I have found,

  is to never bet against the cat but on the cat

  preferably with another human being

  who, unlike the cat, is likely to be carrying money.

  And I cannot think of a better time

  to thank our cat for her obedience to that law

  thus turning me into a consistent winner.

  She’s a pure black one, quite impossible

  to photograph and prone to disappearing

  into the night or even into the thin shadows of noon.

  Such an amorphous blob of blackness is she

  the only way to tell she is approaching

  is to notice the two little yellow circles of her eyes

  then only one circle when she is walking away

  with her tail raised high—something like

  the lantern signals of Paul Revere,

  American silversmith, galloping patriot.

  Only Child

  I never wished for a sibling, boy or girl.

  Center of the universe,

  I had the back of my parents’ car

  all to myself. I could look out one window

  then slide over to the other window

  without any quibbling over territorial rights,

  and whenever I played a game

  on the floor of my bedroom, it was always my turn.

  Not until my parents entered their 90s

  did I long for a sister, a nurse I named Mary,

  who worked in a
hospital

  five minutes away from their house

  and who would drop everything,

  even a thermometer, whenever I called.

  “Be there in a jiff” and “On my way!”

  were two of her favorite expressions, and mine.

  And now that the parents are dead,

  I wish I could meet Mary for coffee

  every now and then at that Italian place

  with the blue awning where we would sit

  and reminisce, even on rainy days.

  I would gaze into her green eyes

  and see my parents, my mother looking out

  of Mary’s right eye and my father staring out of her left,

  which would remind me of what an odd duck

  I was as a child, a little prince and a loner,

  who would break off from his gang of friends

  on a Saturday and find a hedge to hide behind.

  And I would tell Mary about all that, too,

  and never embarrass her by asking about

  her nonexistence, and maybe we

  would have another espresso and a pastry

  and I would always pay the bill and walk her home.

  The Night of the Fallen Limb

  It sounded like a chest of drawers

  being tipped over, but it turned out to be

  the more likely crashing down of a limb,

  and there it was crippled on the lawn

  in the morning after the storm had passed.

  One day you may notice a chip on a vase

  or an oddly shaped cloud

  or a car parked at the end of a shadowy lane,

  but what I noticed that summer day

  from a reading chair on the small front porch

  was a sparrow who appeared out of nowhere,

  as birds often do, then vanished

  into the leafy interior of the fallen limb

  as if it were still growing from the tree,

  budding and burgeoning like all the days before.

  Toward evening, two men arrived with a chainsaw

  and left behind only a strewing of sawdust

  and a scattering of torn leaves

  before driving off in their green truck.

  But earlier, I had heard chirping

  issuing from inside the severed appendage

  as if nothing had happened at all,

  as if that bird had forever to sing her little song.

  And that reminded me of the story of St. Denis,

  the third-century Christian martyr,

  who reacted to his own decapitation

  by picking his head up from the ground,

  after it tumbled to a stop, of course,

  and using it to deliver to the townspeople

  what turned out to be his most memorable sermon.

  Greece

  The ruins were taking their time falling apart,

  stones that once held up other stones

  now scattered on top of one another

  as if many centuries had to pass

  before they harkened to the call of gravity.

  The few pillars still upright

  had nervous looks on their faces

  teetering there in the famous sunlight

  which descended on the grass and the disheveled stones.

  And that is precisely how the bathers appeared

  after we had changed at the cliff-side hotel

  and made our way down to the rocky beach—

  pillars of flesh in bathing suits,

  two pillars tossing a colorful ball,

  one pillar lying with his arm around another,

  even a tiny pillar with a pail and shovel,

  all deaf to a voice as old as the surf itself.

  Is not poetry a megaphone held up

  to the whispering lips of death?

  I wrote, before capping my pen

  and charging into the waves with a shout.

  Bashō in Ireland

  I am like the Japanese poet

  who longed to be in Kyoto

  even though he was already in Kyoto.

  I am not exactly like him

  because I am not Japanese

  and I have no idea what Kyoto is like.

  But once, while walking around

  the Irish town of Ballyvaughan

  I caught myself longing to be in Ballyvaughan.

  The sensation of being homesick

  for a place that is not my home

  while being right in the middle of it

  was particularly strong

  when I passed the hotel bar

  then the fluorescent depth of a launderette,

  also when I stood at the crossroads

  with the road signs pointing in 3 directions

  and the enormous buses making the turn.

  It might have had something to do

  with the nearby limestone hills

  and the rain collecting on my collar,

  but then again I have longed

  to be with a number of people

  while the two of us were sitting in a room

  on an ordinary evening

  without a limestone hill in sight,

  thousands of miles from Kyoto

  and the simple wonders of Ballyvaughan,

  which reminds me

  of another Japanese poet

  who wrote how much he enjoyed

  not being able to see

  his favorite mountain because of all the fog.

  Not So Still Life

  The halves of the cleaved-open cantaloupe

  are rocking toward the violin lying on its back,

  and the ruby grapes appear to be moving

  a millimeter at a time

  in the direction of the inkwell and the furled map,

  former symbols of culture and sense.

  The china cup cannot be stopped

  from advancing subtly toward

  the silvery trout on a brown cedar plank

  for a reason no one can provide

  even if you made the mistake of asking.

  But that’s the way it goes

  when you commit to a painting

  after accepting an offering of mushrooms.

  I wish that the dull grey pewter jug

  were not shifting

  toward the crystal bowl of lemons

  and that the sunflowers

  and the exposed oysters had agreed

  at some point to remain in their regular places.

  With the skull inching toward the pear,

  and the cluster of eggs beginning to wander,

  I had to reassure myself

  that my mother and father were still alive,

  I had a place to stay

  and a couple thousand dollars in a savings account.

  It was just then that a realistic orange

  collided silently with a brass candlestick

  in some woman’s spacious apartment

  on top of one of the many hills of San Francisco.

  Cosmology

  I never put any stock in that image of the earth

  resting on the backs of four elephants

  who are standing on a giant sea turtle,

  who is in turn supported by an infinite regression

  of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever.

  I mean who in their right mind would?

  But now that we are on the subject,

  my substitute picture would have the earth

  with its entire population of people and things

  resting on the head of Keith Richards,

  who is holding a Marlboro in one hand

  and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other.

  As long as Keith keeps talking about

  the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones,

  the earth will continue to spin merrily

  and revolve in a timely manner around the sun.

  But if he changes the subject or even pause
s

  too long, it’s pretty much curtains for us all.

  Unless, of course, one person somehow survives

  being hurtled into the frigidity of outer space;

  then we would have a movie on our hands—

  but wait, there wouldn’t be any hands

  to write the script or make the movie,

  and no theatres either, no buttered popcorn, no giant Pepsi.

  So we may as well see Keith standing

  on the shoulders of the other Rolling Stones,

  who are in turn standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,

  who, were it not for that endless stack of turtles,

  one on top of the other all the way down,

  would find himself standing on nothing at all.

  Dream Life

  Whenever I have a dream about Poetry,

  which is not very often

  considering how much I think about her,

  she appears as a seamstress

  who works in the window of a tailor’s shop

  in a sector of a provincial city

  laden with a grey and heavy sky.

  I know the place so well

  I could find the dimly lit shop

  without asking anyone for directions,

  though the streets are mostly empty,

  except when I saw a solitary man

  looking in the window of a butcher’s,

  his hands in the pockets of his raincoat.

  Poetry works long hours

  and rarely speaks to the tailor

  as she bends to repair the fancy costumes

  of various allegorical figures